Gauging Customer Experience With Online Communities

Complex but Simple

Our market research online community software company is like any other tech company out there in terms of the challenges faced. As a tech company you are constantly working to improve your product. The second biggest challenge is creating a complex software that is easy to use for both the client and the end user. In a recent article for Mopinion.com entitled, What does the online customer journey look like for tech companies? the author Erin Gilliam looks at the competitive nature of the tech industry and the need to continually innovate to stay ahead of the competition. She writes how one aspect of making your company thrive is the ability to make the user experience as painless as possible, as it can make or break you.

Teaching the Customer How to Use Your Software to Solve their Problem

A good technology based company solves a problem for their customers. Our online community software solves the problem of gathering quantitative and qualitative research in a cheaper, more efficient way than traditional surveys and focus groups. Uber solves the problem of transportation, by allowing individuals to hail an Uber to get them from point A to point B. While tech companies are selling a product, they are also requiring their customers to learn how to use interface to be able to use the product. If learning the software or technology is too difficult then no matter how great your product is, it won’t be used. Gilliam writes, “for the tech industry, purchasing is only just the beginning as these customers must also learn and understand how the product they’ve purchased works.”

The key to success as stated by the author is to understand and acknowledge the customers online journey with your product, especially once they have chosen the brand. “For example, how easy is it to use and/or implement your product? Where are they running into trouble? Or why have they stopped using/buying your product(s).”

Your Product is Not as Good as Photoshop

When you think of a product like Photoshop, which is a tremendously useful software used for editing photos and creating media materials, the software can do some many things that it seems overwhelming if you are a first time user. This product luckily has hours of training videos on YouTube to walk the user through the most basic tasks to the most complex. If you are lucky to have created such a revolutionary product such as Photoshop you can rest assured that your users will create most of your training materials for you free of charge, but lets be honest, your product probably isn’t Photoshop which means you will have to teach your users how to use the software in the most easy and efficient way possible.

Not only will you need to create easy to use training materials but you will also have to gather feedback from your users to find out, how you can make your software more intuitive. Individuals are used to working with Facebook, Instagram, and SnapChat, so to make things similar wherever possible is a reduction in frustration. If you need to gain personal information, you have to ask whether you can have users login through their Facebook or Gmail account instead? This has just saved them 5 minutes of typing and kept a huge percentage of users from dropping off.

With our qualitative and quantitative research tools we knew that with other competitors software the tasks were often so difficult that users either gave up on the software altogether or opted to pay the provider to run their research for them. Knowing that smaller companies don’t have the budget to give up on a software or to hire others to run it for them we decided to create a video series that users can follow step-by-step to be able to perform each task that the software offers.

Reducing Frustration

The goal is to have users feel as though they are on a similar platform which they already know how to use. Where new tasks need to be performed, your company should focus on making that experience as intuitive and easy as possible. By focusing on customer experience you can ensure that you reduce the amount of drop off in the early stages before getting into the wonderful solutions that your product has to offer. If you are thinking about how to gather customer feedback, consider MROC software as an affordable way to gather continual continual feedback about the user experience.

If you would like to find out more about how market research online communities can help you, please feel free to contact us.